The disease isn't expected to pose a serious threat to European wheat areas, some experts say, because it can't tolerate frost. In addition, the Alps and the Pyrenees provide natural barriers against spores transported by the wind.

The potential for crop loss in Africa, the Middle East and south Asia is higher. Based on wind patterns and the rate of spread, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says countries in the immediate path of Ug99 grow 25% of global production.
* * *
Of particular concern is a relatively new, aggressive strain of black stem rust, called Ug99 for its 1999 discovery in Uganda, which has spread to Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Iran. Most commercial wheat grown world-wide has no resistance to the disease. The threat comes at a time when wheat stockpiles have shrunk because of bad weather and strong demand for wheat-based foods.
* * *
Fears that the disease may have spread to Pakistan haven't been confirmed, experts say, but Pakistan is a concern because of its proximity to India, the world's third-largest wheat producer.
* * *
"This new strain of rust has the big potential to destroy right now the major commercial wheat varieties, especially in the irrigated areas where there's high use of fertilizer, be it organic or inorganic," said Norman Borlaug, professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University.
* * *
Ug99 poses a more serious threat to commercial crops than even the U.S. black-stem-rust epidemic of 1954 that destroyed 40% of the U.S. wheat crop, experts said.
* * *
There are some signs of hope. Scientists in the U.S. are finding effective resistance to Ug99. But many of these sources are wild relatives of wheat, and there are problems with moving the ability to resist Ug99 into commercially viable seed.

"We're fortunate here in that we've hopefully got quite a few years of lead time," said Marty Carson, research leader with the Cereals Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., a division of the U.S. Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service. "We're not in the situation, for example, of say India and Pakistan," which face more immediate threats.

Dr. Jin works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, in greenhouses where he examines wheat samples infested with the telltale brown lesions of stem rust and seeks to identify plants whose genes resist the disease. His lab was hit by a $300,000 cut this year, 20 percent of its overall budget. The Bush administration made that reduction in a quest for budget savings. At the same time, money for international research centers that Yue works closely with, including a wheat laboratory in Mexico, saw their U.S. funding cut from $25 million to $7 million.

The threat to wheat, which provides 20 percent of the calories for the world's population, is but one facet of a food crisis that has sneaked up on policymakers. Overall U.S. spending for agricultural development around the world has dropped from more than $1 billion a year in the 1980s to less than one-third of that since 2000. "This amounts to neglect," says Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The international labs, part of a consortium called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, have for years been financed in part by the Agency for International Development. However when it came time to dole out money this year, AID found it had little to give because Congress had specified that nearly all overseas development aid go to other priorities - education, water projects, help for business start-ups, combating AIDS and malaria and promoting democracy.* * * The cuts in agricultural research budgets couldn't come at a worse time, says Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 94-year-old Nobel laureate best known as the father of the "Green Revolution" that brought adequate food supplies to developing countries around the world in the mid-20th century. Lulled by that success, "the public and policymakers became complacent" about maintaining research, Borlaug said in an interview. * * * The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in April gave $27 million to help fund rust research in Mexico, Kenya and Ethiopia.

A Government Accountability Office report due out this week concludes that the United States and other developed countries have failed to give proper attention to helping their poorer neighbors grow sufficient food to feed their people.

John McCain is going to straight talk himself right into a hole. The New York Times is reporting that he cited Ronald Reagan while talking about reducing our deficit. Sad thing is the deficit tripled under the Reagan Administration. 

 Read more here.

Frank George

-------------------------------------------------------------

Contribute $1 to the Democratic Party's effort to Stop John McCain. 

"Florida is behaving as though we were in a national recession," said Amy Baker, coordinator for the Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research. * * * the 2007-08 spending plan will wind up another $1 billion short before the fiscal year ends June 30.